Excerpt from Johns Hopkins University Circulars, Vol. 22: December, 1902

The manuscript basis on which this last-mentioned edition rests is unknown to me, but the author himself is thought to have com posed his work about the year 1220, and hence the passage quoted above attests the early popularity of the Merlin legend in the valley of the Rhine.

Alfred william stratton, ph. D., 1895, died on the 23d of August, at Gulmarg in Kashmir in India. He was graduated in 1887 in the University of Toronto, and for some years teacher of Classics in the Hamilton Collegiate Institute. In 1892 he came to this University as a student of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology, was appointed Fellow in 1893, and promoted to the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1895. He was at once made Assistant, and later Associate in Sanskrit at the University of Chicago there he remained, a successful teacher and investigator, until the year 1899.

At that time the combined position of Principal of the Ori ental College at Lahore and Registrar of the. Panjab University became vacant. The incumbent of that position, the famous Indologist A. M. Stein, had accepted the post of Principal of the Madrassah in Calcutta, and Professor Bloomfield was called upon to nominate his successor. Upon his recommendation Dr. Stratton was duly appointed to the difficult and responsible post. His duties were to administer the affairs of higher education in the Panjab, and at the same time to manage the Oriental College at Lahore and to lecture on Sanskrit and Comparative Philology. He was also carrying on during that time investigations of a high order, and collecting manuscript materials for the production of a hitherto unpublished Vedic text. In July of the present year he left Lahore for his vacation in Kashmir; he appeared to be well, though overworked and weakened by the heat of the Indian plains. The second day after reaching the mountains he fell ill of Malta fever, ' died, and was buried at Gulmarg. He was thirty eight years of age at the time of his death. His wife was with him until the end came; there are no children. Indian science has lost through his death one of its most useful and promising workers; the Johns Hopkins University one of its most brilliant graduates.

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